Find maximum possible time HH:MM by permuting four given digits

Question

I recently took a coding test for a promotion at work. This was one of the tasks I really struggled with and was wondering what is the best way to do this. I used a load of

Answer 1

I'd use JavaScript's Date object to determine if a particular time was valid, by parsing the string as an ISO datetime string (like 1970-01-01T62:87) and then testing !isNaN( aDateInstance.getTime() ) and comparing the Date instance with the earlier saved largest Date instance (if applicable):

// permutator() borrowed from https://stackoverflow.com/a/20871714
function permutator( inputArr ) {
  var results = [];

  function permute( arr, memo ) {
    var cur, memo = memo || [];

    for( var i = 0; i < arr.length; i++ ) {
      cur = arr.splice( i, 1 );
      if( arr.length === 0 ) {
        results.push( memo.concat( cur ) );
      }
      permute( arr.slice(), memo.concat( cur ) );
      arr.splice( i, 0, cur[ 0 ] );
    }

    return results;
  }

  return permute( inputArr );
}

function generate( A, B, C, D ) {
  var r = null;
  permutator( [ A, B, C, D ] ).forEach( function( p ) {
    var d = new Date( '1970-01-01T' + p[ 0 ] + '' + p[ 1 ] + ':' + p[ 2 ] + '' + p[ 3 ] );
    if( !isNaN( d.getTime() ) && d > r ) {
      r = d;
    }
  } );

  var h, m;
  return r ? ( ( h = r.getHours() ) < 10 ? '0' + h : h ) + ':' + ( ( m = r.getMinutes() ) < 10 ? '0' + m : m ) : 'NOT POSSIBLE';
}